GARDEN CITY, N.Y. - Defense Contract Management Agency Garden City recently completed its 2013 Self-Assessment for Strategic Systems Programs workload. The contract management office’s leadership made a concerted effort to improve performance following the last self-assessment. Consistent with other CMOs conducting similar assessments, the May 2011 process showed a significant number of findings.

“We set some pretty aggressive goals as a team this year,” said Stanton Moore, Program Support Team program integrator. “We focused our preparations on ensuring we had zero repeat findings and reducing our overall findings to less than eight.”

The team exceeded these goals — in fact the self-assessment showed no findings at all. The review team took note of the improvement, writing, “PST demonstrated significant improvement in the quality of surveillance planning and execution since the 2011 self-assessment.”

This year’s assessment was conducted in mid-September onsite at Lockheed Martin Mitchel Field in Uniondale, where DCMA Garden City’s Program Support Team is stationed. The PST has members from all functional areas and each member was interviewed by Bruce Heim, DCMA Space and Missile Sector, or Harvey Leake from DCMA Operations. The interviews focused on tracing the IGD/MOA requirements to the locally developed surveillance plans and, finally, to the objective evidence proving the activity was completed satisfactorily.

The biannual assessment focused on the CMO’s surveillance planning, execution and documentation of the Interface Guidelines Document; an agency level memorandum of agreement; and the local MOA between the CMO and program management office.